Before I put my soul on the line and open the new philosophy section (which is coming, I promise as I can’t back down now), I have a challenge for you.
I wrote the below post back in September but never hit that PUBLISH button. It was a personal blog entry I just needed to write. Several weeks later I went to that motivational seminar and felt a new inspiration to put “out there” the stories and thoughts I have been working on for several years.
The new section is something I need to do. I need to put this part of me out there in order to feel that I am trying at the very least. I am trying to be the person I want and need to be after all these years.
Below is the post that sat dormant for almost two month, but now I am going to release it because it really does express what has led me to this point. It expresses what I want to do, hope to do and need to do with the new section.
And my life, that is.
But I am also releasing it as challenge to all of you. A challenge to post one of YOUR unpublished entries. You know what I mean. One of those entries you wrote but never let go of, never hit that PUBLISH button.
Because I know you have them! I just know I am not alone…
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(the following post was originally written on September 19, 2009 and was titled “The Forgotten Niche”):
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The Forgotten Niche:
I bought my first philosophy book when I was 13. I bought it for a quarter at this local thrit shop. It was a college text book from 1968. I remember reading it off and on that year, finding myself completely enthralled. A new world opened up for me with that book.
Then later, years later in college, one of my philosophy professors stopped me in the halls. He told me he was teaching a Philosophy of Religion course that semester and noticed I hadn’t signed up for it. He wanted to know why. I told him I couldn’t take his course because I had already taken that course at the community college before I transferred to UNM. So we went to his office, went over the curriculum of his course and compared it to the curriculum of my past course, then made some changes. He changed two of the books, added another book to the list and then petitioned the dean to let me take his course as a 300 level class. I got to take the class again for full credit! Later, I asked him why he did that. “Because you belonged in that class,” he told me.
The next year I took my first Logic class. I fell in love. Logic and me went hand in hand. The professor was a visting professor from the University of Chicago and everyone revered him, including me. That summer I ran into his assistant in our local cafe. That’s when I learned that our professor went nuts when he found out I got a 100 on his final. He told this assistant that “no one, no one gets a 100 on his finals”. He insisted on looking over my final himself to find a flaw. In the end, he couldn’t find anything wrong with it even though he threw in a theorem that most of his grad students didn’t understand. I got a perfect score.
Finally, at my graduation, one of the professors stood up and announced that I was the only student in his class that received an “A”. In fact, I was the only student who got an “A” in that class for the past three years he taught it, even at a graduate level. He even said he looked forward to seeing what else I would do in the years to come.
So why am I telling you all this? To impress you about my past accomplishments at some mediocre university at best?
Hardly.
I’m telling you in hopes that you might understand what it’s like. How it’s a beautiful thing when you finally find your niche in life, especially if you are like me and spent the first half of your life as a lost misfit. When you finally realize and know what your are really good at, what you were made to do and what stirs your soul and propels you to want to make a difference, understand, improve and grow.
Maybe you might understand what it is like during these times, when fall arrives and that feeling of going back to school creeps into your skin, even twenty years after the fact. Or hell, maybe you even find yourself in the same place sometimes. Sitting alone, late at night during these first autumn nights wondering, “What the fuck am I doing with my life?”
Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:15PM 